Data centers are becoming increasingly more densely packed with electronic components to accommodate for ever-increasing computing demands. Examples of such data centers are Internet data centers having server applications that execute in a horizontally scalable topology across hundreds or thousands of commodity servers.
The increased scale and power densities associated with the more densely packed data centers typically have a significant impact on the thermal properties of the data centers. Specifically, the electronic components and racks generate tremendous amounts of heat that is costly to remove. By way of example, the power required to remove the heat dissipated by a plurality of racks in a data center is generally equal to the power needed to operate the components in the racks.
Data centers can cost millions of dollars per year to power and cool. A large factor in this cost is the cooling of physical servers that are located in non-ideal locations within the data center. Significant money can be saved if efficient techniques are used to cool servers in data centers.